BMI's Julia A. Seymour appeared on today's Fox Business Live with Stuart Varney to discuss the discrepancy in media coverage of unemployment under Presidents Reagan and Obama.
Author of BMI's latest study, "Networks Flip-Flop on Jobs," Seymour explained her findings:
We looked specifically at seven months of coverage in 1982 and again in 2009 that had very similar periods of unemployment where it was going up between 8 - between 8 and the high 9 percent range. And what we found was that the network reporting on ABC, NBC and CBS was overwhelmingly negative to Reagan but positive toward Obama. They were actually 13 times more negative to President Reagan than they were to Obama.
As Seymour further explained, the bias continued over into outright cheerleading by the networks for Obama's policies.
They had different policy approaches and I would have to say that given the media coverage we've already seen under President Obama, that the media like Obama's approach and solutions to the economic problems we've had. Thy supported the stimulus package. We saw that again in this analysis of unemployment stories where the media were overwhelmingly pro-stimulus and pro-government intervention.
